← Fame through time1840-1849
The 1840s
Whose names filled the books of the 1840s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in English books during the 1840s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus110 - 2
Augustus14 - 3
Cicero12 - 4
Homer12 - 5
Plato9.9 - 6
Aristotle9.1 - 7
Virgil7.6 - 8
Herodotus7.1 - 9
Robert Peel7.1 - 10
Socrates6.5 - 11
Plutarch5.7 - 12
John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford4.8 - 13
Strabo4.8 - 14
Charlemagne4.8 - 15
Origen4.5 - 16
Livy4.2 - 17
Tertullian4.2 - 18
Demosthenes3.7 - 19
Walter Scott3.6 - 20
Ovid3.3 - 21
Bede3.3 - 22
Xenophon3.0 - 23
Lord Byron2.9 - 24
James II, Count of Urgell2.8 - 25
Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor2.7
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1840s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Abraham Lincoln22 decades - 2
Edgar Allan Poe17 decades - 3
Charles Dickens20 decades - 4
Charles Darwin21 decades - 5
Frédéric Chopin16 decades - 6
Richard Wagner19 decades - 7
Hans Christian Andersen18 decades - 8
Andrew Johnson22 decades - 9
Nikolai Gogol19 decades - 10
Napoleon III21 decades - 11
Pope Leo XIII15 decades - 12
Søren Kierkegaard3 decades - 13
Emily Brontë14 decades - 14
Giuseppe Garibaldi11 decades - 15
Joseph Smith22 decades - 16
Mikhail Lermontov15 decades - 17
Robert E. Lee16 decades - 18
Giuseppe Verdi18 decades - 19
Franz Liszt19 decades - 20
John Stuart Mill18 decades - 21
Felix Mendelssohn18 decades - 22
P. T. Barnum17 decades - 23
Robert Schumann19 decades - 24
Jefferson Davis20 decades - 25
Taras Shevchenko13 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.